Tournament structure

Tournament Format refers to how a quizbowl tournament is structured in how the matches played affect the overall standings and awards at a tournament. This is separate from the issue of how questions are written; even tournaments using good questions can suffer by using poor tournament formats.

Good Quizbowl Tournament Formats

The dominant good quizbowl tournament formats consist of some kind of round-robin between evenly seeded (as best as possible) teams in the morning followed by later rebracketed round-robins to help determine the championship and overall placement. This allows teams to compete in a fairly large sample of matches and to advance based on their skills and knowledge rather than luck (as much as possible). Such a format also allows most teams to get games against opponents of a variety of abilities in the morning while matching up against opponents with similar abilities (based on morning record) in later matches, thus making matches more competitive and better opportunities for learning.

Bad Quizbowl Tournament Formats

Bad quizbowl tournament formats are those that do not attempt to fairly reward teams with more knowledge in the tournament outcomes and standings. Although there are a wide variety of examples of bad quizbowl formats, some of those traits include:

• Completely random seeding of teams in brackets

This is especially a problem in single-elimination tournaments, such as TV shows. Although some may argue that this is the only fair way to seed teams, a tournament director can use previous records at other tournaments, the records of returning players for each team, and other measures (such as a pre-show tournament, which several TV shows have now done) to more fairly seed teams. The Vanderbilt ABC pioneered the use of Friday night seeding matches for the purpose of improving seeding for their brackets on Saturday.

• "Stacking" certain preliminary brackets with the strongest teams on purpose

Certain tournaments are known to stack their prelim brackets to make some brackets stronger than others on purpose. This may be for the enjoyment of the tournament director or as a ham-fisted attempt to get new teams into the trophy rounds. Either way, this is grossly unfair to teams and can often lead to bizarre results in the final rankings and outcomes.

• Allowing only a few matches for each team

This increases the chance of some unlucky event happening and knocking a team out of a tournament or getting a bad packet for them; a larger sample size of questions and matches is usually considered a better opportunity for teams to prove their knowledge. (Additionally, this is often a financial rip-off for schools who get to play only a couple of matches)

• Using points scored as a metric for advancement to the playoffs/finals when teams play on imbalanced schedules

This means that some schools have a much harder schedule than others, making it harder/easier for them to put up points in a way that's orthogonal to their actual abilities and knowledge. This disparity can be exacerbated by other format issues like random seeding and three-team matches.